There are eccentric people everywhere. The thing about small towns is that such people are much more likely to stand out and actually have an impact. The people behind The Colbert Report seems to have the knack for finding such people and getting them to agree to be on TV.
The Colbert Report
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This schmuck gave himself away as a nutcase by telling Obama to go back to Kenya. Obviously, he’s a birther and hence a loony tunes like Orly Taitz and company. There is nothing funny about this as this putz will find out if he actually shoots down a drone.
You can laugh at this guy all you want, but frankly I prefer his shooting of drones down then the MIT professor’s backing of a future of massive drone overlords.
How can you consider things like US V. Jones which was only narrowly won (and on the wrong grounds), or consider NSA spying, and not root for this guy and his shotgun downing drones?
It seems odd for Colbert to take the position he seems to.
And ya know, good for him for learning how to write an ordinance and doing so.
The laughs of the crowd at this guy are actually pretty sick.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison
[20] Thoreau may have also brooded over the reaction of Emerson, who criticized the imprisonment as pointless. According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?” Emerson was “out there” because he believed it was shortsighted to protest an isolated evil; society required an entire rebirth of spirituality.
[21] Emerson missed the point of Thoreau’s protest, which was not intended to reform society but was simply an act of conscience. If we do not distinguish right from wrong, Thoreau argued that we will eventually lose the capacity to make the distinction and become, instead, morally numb.
[22] Near the end of his life, Thoreau was asked, “Have you made your peace with God?” He replied, “I did not know we had ever quarrelled.” For Thoreau, that would have been the real cost of paying his poll tax; it would have meant quarreling with his own conscience, which was too close to quarreling with God.
WTF? And WTF are you going to say to anyone hit by scatter shot that misses any sighted drone, or bird mistaken for a drone, and returns to earth. What goes up tends to come back down. Less chance of harm if he uses smaller shot but this idiot is going to want to use bigger shot so he has some chance of hitting any drone given that they typically travel at higher altitudes.
Spent projectiles returning and causing harm is the reason most counties have rules against celebratory gunfire.
Recently in rural Ohio an Amish buggy returned home with a young woman shot dead inside. The case baffled police as to motive until it turned out that she had been accidentally killed by a falling bullet that had been shot into the air more than a mile away.
I get what you’re saying, but the fact is this guy is firing a shotgun into the air. That’s just dangerous.
I think the notion of shooting arms into the air, especially after drones, is pretty stupid, even as I applaud this guy’s desire to fight the oncoming drogue invastion.
However, my gut belief is that shot into the air from a shotgun, shot won’t travel a mile away and lacks the impact needed to kill people after a ballistic descent through air.
If you google how far will shotgun shot travel there is lots of discussion ala Dick Cheney of shot being relatively harmless after a couple hundred feet.
One page lists “a formula from an expert” of yards of travel being 2200 * diameter of the pellet in inches and using the biggest shotgun pellet wiki lists of 0.6 inches that gives that one pellet a distance of 4000 feet. That’s pretty much a bullet sized pellet — I do wonder how far it could travel and the impact it could punch.
From my youth I remember dove hunting (over glorified pigeons) and having shot from other hunters across the field rain down on us. #8 & #6 shot is about like standing in a sleet storm. From other parts of my misspent youth I can tell you that #0 buckshot in ballistic freefall will drive you to the ground and leave pump knots and welts. Poor guy doesn’t understand how drone warfare works, from several miles up and several miles away they send supersonic smart weapons at you. Once you are targeted you have less chance than a snowball in hell.